reflection
Everything that we interact with on a daily basis from social media, using the bathroom, cooking, transportation, etc. is all part of a service design. Touchpoints and pain points are essential portions of what encompasses different services. As we have learned in class, a service can be anything and can be applied to any industry. Service Design is shaping a useful, efficient, and desirable service through customer experience, innovation, and collaboration. Design for the user by the user is another way to put it. The core of service design is the user — their needs, wants, pain points, etc. For the designers, one of the most helpful skills is empathy. Designers who are able to empathize with their customers’ pain points will better understand how they need to solve their problems. In the simplest terms, I would explain service design as finding solutions to user’s problems. It combines customer journeys with business, design, marketing, engineering, operations, and management. In a design team, there are multiple different teams that work on different aspects of the design and at different times, but they all come together to complete one goal: solving the user’s pain point.
My first understanding of service design was the service safari that we first did. It got me to look at touchpoints of a service. What I did not realize before was touchpoints for a service begins when you walk through a door (literal or metaphorical) and ends when you exit through that same door. For a physical service such as a restaurant, touchpoints included ordering food, the ambiance of the place, the quality of service presented, the food itself, and the overall experience. I thought heavily about the emotions each touchpoint evoked pre-COVID and during COVID. The touchpoints revealed what areas were important to me as a consumer and where the businesses put time into developing. After this exercise, I started to pay more attention to my experiences and journeys of my everyday life. Grocery shopping at trader joes became a trip where I analyzed the flow and layout of the store in terms of the service design. To keep the lines moving and minimize the amount of people in the store only a certain amount of people are allowed inside, and there is a system at the registers that is always monitored by an employee. I only realized all these touchpoints and design aspects after the service safari.
My favorite activity we did was the mini design jam. Even though it was fast and on a much smaller scale than other design jams, it was fun to collaborate with peers and come up with a service from a very simple idea — a box. During the jam session, the first thing was the brainstorming separately then the sharing of ideas. Most of my team members’ minds went to similar places and from there we were able to delve into one idea. However, when we shared our projects at the end of class, it was interesting to see how the other group went a completely different way, one that was not even recognized by my group. Our research time was short, but even with a small amount of time, there is a lot that designers can find out and use into a working solution. When it came to prototyping and ideating an idea, we combined different aspects of various individual ideas along with what we considered to be competitors while still solving user pain points. Under such a small time constraint of two hours to find, design, and solve a problem is difficult, but it is amazing what we can do when we work with others. The biggest thing I learned from this activity was that sometimes working quickly under the smaller time constraints puts more pressure on your brain to think outside the box. If I had more time, I would’ve been stuck on one thing and would not have branched into other areas. With the short amount of time, my brain was forced to think outside the box with my teammates to bring a creative solution to a problem.
Service Design to me is really interesting because it encompasses so many different aspects and skills. It can also be used in a variety of different fields. The first thing that comes to mind for me is UI/UX design for websites and apps. I have had some experience designing UI/UX for apps and websites, and the first thing I always do is map out the user journey and the variances that can occur in the user journey. This creates a clearer understanding of where the design should go. But, every little thing from placement of buttons, arrows, texts, and pictures all comes down to how the user perceives it and acts with it. I would bring and use service design to further my knowledge and experience in UI/UX design. For my operations management class, I did a case study on Virgin Hyperloop and their future rendering of a certification center and their hyperloop pods. While I was watching and going through the rendering, the only thought going through my head was the service design of the entire project: what it would entail, the design process, the research process, and more. I analyzed and looked at every part of the POD and noticed why the designers might have put certain objects in certain places and the reason behind it. It would be so interesting to see in the future what this center would look like and what the service design process behind it would be. Connecting and empathizing with users is my favorite part of service design. It’s where designers put themselves into users’ shoes and design around it. We are midway through this class, but I can tell that I want to incorporate service design into my career.
